school and learn how to write. She knew, of course, how to write Yiddish perfectly and Russian just as perfectly, but neither used the Latin script. She had to learn that to write English.
She learned quickly and in a very short time was able to send me short letters in painstakingly formed English writing. One of the teachers at the night school finally nerved himself to ask The Question (as the Asimov family referred to it).
"Pardon me, Mrs. Asimov," he said, stopping her in the hall. "Are you by any chance a relation of Isaac Asimov?"
My mother, who was four feet, ten inches tall, drew herself up to her full height and said, proudly, "Yes. He is my dear son."
"Aha," said the teacher, "no wonder you are such a good writer."
"I beg your pardon," said my mother, freezingly. "No wonder he is such a good writer."
—Infinity Plus
The Lost
by Jonathan Aycliffe
HarperCollins, 176 pages, hardback, 1996
Aycliffe is better known as Daniel Easterman, who might be regarded as an author of the thinking person's fat airport bestseller. (Neither name is the author's real one.) The Lost is the fifth in the series of shorter novels he has released under the Aycliffe pseudonym. In earlier books – like Naomi's Room , Whispers in the Dark and The Vanishment – he seemed intent on recreating the atmosphere of M.R. James for the 1990s; these were exceptionally spooky ghost stories, and their aficionados generally read them in a single terrified sitting ... which probably ended at three in the morning.
The Lost is a bit different, since it relates less to M.R. James than to Bram Stoker. The style is epistolary, very much as was Stoker's Dracula , although much more readably so. It is revealed to us that none of the characters is quite (or at all) whom the others thinks s/he is.
Young Michael Feraru, a Briton of Romanian descent, believes that, after the anti-Communist revolution in Romania, he can reclaim the property his family abandoned as they fled the country in the wake of WWII. Sure enough, he discovers on going there that he is really Count Mihai Vlahuta and that he owns the remote and vast Castel Vlaicu (Vlaicu Castle). En route to the castle he falls in love with his Romanian lawyer, Liliana Popescu, little realizing that she has not fallen in love with him but just enjoys having sex. When they arrive at the castle they discover it to be tenanted by two people, mother and son, whom they assume to be caretakers, still there after all these years. But the "caretakers" prove likewise to be of Vlahuta stock, and the mother knows the terrible secret of the castle and of the Vlahuta family – that their dead never truly die, but continue to exist as soul-eaters ( strigoï ) ...
The most fascinating part of this sometimes confused book (there are occult events back in England which go unexplained) is the way in which Aycliffe studies the changing personality of his central character, who evolves from a simple prep-school master to become a quite ruthless Romanian aristocrat. There are many scarinesses but also a sense of pathos as we watch him head towards his spiritual doom. Unusually, this is a book which might have benefited from being a little bit longer: its pared-downness makes it exceptionally readable, but there is a certain lack of the depth of feeling present in the earlier Aycliffe novels. Nevertheless, The Lost is recommended.
—Samhain
Atom
by Steve Aylett
Phoenix House, 137 pages, hardback, 2000
Set in the city of Beerlight, this short novel (almost a novella) represents an attempted hybridization of surrealism with the Hammett/Chandler hardboiled detective tale. Whether there is actually any point in trying to marry two such antithetical modes – surrealism deconstructs Story, the detective tale relies on Story – is a question for another arena; the book, which is replete with conscious references to the Fathers of Surrealism (notably Magritte), must be taken on its own terms or not at all.
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